Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace by Georgia Cervin (review)

Abstract

Spring 2022 71 range of early European writings about local football contests along the Atlantic seaboard and later nineteenth-century sources chronicling the Washoe and other Indigenous groups further west, Bunk highlights a diverse range of football games dating back at least to the sixteenth century “enmeshed in the social and cultural lives” of Indigenous populations across the continent (30). While acknowledging the impossibility of knowing how Indigenous games evolved upon contact with European populations, Bunk nevertheless makes a convincing argument that adaptations of imported football practices transpired within Indigenous communities that already played their own analogous games and were predisposed to this type of competition. Another place From Football to Soccer shines is in its treatment of women’s early engagement with soccer and other football codes in the United States. Following a trend that mirrors scholarship on women’s football in England, Latin America, and other parts of the world, Bunk shows how the earliest female soccer players were “determined to show they could excel at the sport” despite a tendency to treat these contests “if not as a joke then at least something to be approached with bemused curiosity often combined with voyeuristic sexism” (120). Showcasing a pair of women’s matches in San Francisco in December 1893 as the first instance where women played explicitly under association football rules, Bunk traces not only a continued engagement with the sport into the twentieth century but also a longer history of football playing that stretches back to early Indigenous games that were not always segregated by sex. Interspersed throughout the book are a range of illustrations and photographs that reinforce the textual arguments presented by Bunk, highlighting a rich material culture that places the United States as an exemplar, rather than an exception, in terms of how soccer gained purchase as a national pastime in other states around the globe. At times readers might find themselves longing for a map, especially in sections of the book where Bunk discusses how distances between cities impacted the success rate of early regional and professional leagues and teams. Keeping an atlas handy is a small price to pay for the depth of the scholarship Bunk packs between the covers of this book. On balance, Bunk presents an innovative look at early American soccer history that should help put to rest any notion of the United States as a place exceptional among soccer-playing nations. Individual chapters within From Football to Soccer can stand alone as readings for undergraduate courses, and the book is a valuable resource for all who study the history of football codes. —Zachary R. Bigalke Pennsylvania State University